Alejandro Guijarro

SELECTED WORKS BY Alejandro Guijarro

Alejandro GuijarroStanford I

2012

C-type print

117 x 240 cm

Alejandro Guijarroâ€™s works are to-scale photographs of blackboards in academic institutions all over the world that specialize in quantum mechanics: Oxford, Berkeley, Stanford, Cern. The blackboards, photographed with a large format camera in an emptied lecture hall, are presented face-on, frameless, their roiled surfaces reminiscent of mid-century abstract painting (Twombly, Pollock, even Rothko).

Alejandro GuijarroBerkeley I

2012

C-type print

112 x 236 cm

The dynamic abstract forms of scuffed chalk and dragged erasers might allude, as those painted precursors might, to the expressive power of the individual gesture, even a yearning towards the sublime: something inexpressible, beyond the limited range of language. No accident, therefore, that Guijarro chooses the study of quantum mechanics as his subject â€“ the study of the physics of the microscopically small, whose very formulae are expressed in abstract terms.

Alejandro GuijarroBerkeley II

2012

C-type print

112 x 236 cm

That these are photographs, though, brings additional meanings into play. Each image records the physical traces of a mental movement, the speed, repetition and emphasis of individual strokes suggesting a particular train of thought or area of questioning. Yet each blackboard is a token of something lost; every photograph records something subsequently erased or smudged into nothing, acting like the mind itself when attempting to absorb the complex, the inexpressible.